I may have waited a bit too long between finishing this book and reviewing it, as already I feel like I’m losing some of the details from the book. On the other hand, good books tend to linger in your mind, so maybe the fact that I’m already forgetting parts of it is a bad sign. It definitely didn’t have the same kind of punch as Three Parts Dead, which might be due, in part, to much of the world-building already having been done. It didn’t feel as interesting, either, which is the main source of my disappointment.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s a lot of cool stuff here. The water demons are especially memorable, and I think it’s a great idea that a world that trades in magic uses parts of their soul as currency. Plus, Gladstone draws on Mayan and Aztec culture to populate this city, which is something not seen often in fantasy fiction. He even adds a living skeleton as the CEO for one of the companies in the book, which was cool, except I’m a reader of The Order of the Stick, so I kept getting Xykon stuck in my head whenever he appeared in the story. I can’t fault the author for that, though. The biggest problem for me is the main plot is mostly a love story, when all of the other subplots in the book would have made for a better focus.

Caleb, our main character, works for a company that supplies water to a desert region, so it’s a big deal when he’s called out to investigate the possible poisoning of one of their reservoirs. Once there, he encounters a female runner who catches his attention, and, by all rights, is likely responsible for the poisoning. Smitten, Caleb proceeds to make a bunch of stupid decisions that prolong the investigation, simply because he’s convinced she couldn’t be involved. The story is still engaging (possibly more than Three Parts Dead, just because a large part of the world-building isn’t required here), and the plot is complex without being complicated, but I feel like Gladstone was aiming for a younger crowd by zooming in so much on that relationship.

What I like most about this book — and the series overall — is that it’s so different from Three Parts Dead. Instead of writing multiple books about the same character, Gladstone instead creates an entire world where each book can stand independent of the rest, because there’s so much possibility there. I wasn’t so disappointed in Two Serpents Rise that I was ready to give up on the entire series, but the fact that Gladstone’s universe is big enough to support a variety of possible stories gives me more of a reason to keep reading. That the story is about a water management company, and is still interesting, is a feat all by itself.

I’m taking a break from the series for a book or two, not out of lack of interest, but because I have a couple of new books I’ve been wanting to read. After that, I plan to return to Gladstone’s world and see what else he has up his sleeves. So long as he stays a little further away from the romance in them, I expect to like the rest of them as much as I liked the first.

"'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"